Durban - DA leader Mmusi Maimane studiously avoided any mention of the name Helen Zille during the party’s Youth Day rally in Durban on Friday.
Instead, he set his sights on fighting drugs, calling on the government to urgently set up a national anti-drug police unit to battle this scourge, which he said was wreaking havoc in the townships.
He was responding to a report that the Phoenix Police Station, north of Durban, deals with 3000 drug-related cases every month.
Maimane was in Durban to lead hundreds of his supporters in a march against drugs as part of the DA’s Youth Day commemoration of pupils and others who were shot by police on June 16, 1976, for protesting against Afrikaans being imposed by the apartheid government as a medium of instruction in black schools.
“In Tshwane and Johannesburg metro, where DA rules, we have already instituted anti-drug units, and they are working with the SAPS,” Maimane said.
A structure of the DA in Phoenix, handed a list of 51 alleged drug dealers to the station commissioner Brigadier Bafana Ndlovu.
Maimane said the DA’s call for the unit had continuously fallen on President Jacob Zuma’s deaf ears because he was preoccupied with “his handlers”, the Gupta family.
“I am here to say I am sad for the people of Phoenix because under Jacob Zuma you have waited for years.
“When we take over in 2019 we will establish that unit so that our young people will be free from drugs,” he said.